Comments on: How Digg Users Got It Wrong And Missed Out

By: Charlie

Charlie — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:44:24 +0000

Well that’s what the thumbs up/down are there for. Just digg the comment and everyone happy.

By: Justen

Justen — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:03:42 +0000

The whole trend of posting comments on downloads claiming they have a virus or some other sneaky hidden code is getting really old. You see this on torrent sites constantly (legitimate software or not!). To the point where some great apps and information gets left for dead by the roadside. Who does this kind of thing anyway? It has to be about the lamest form of internet griefing ever.

“Hur hur hur it has a virus lulz!”

You’d have to be retarded to believe a PDF book can execute validation code anyway :/

By: ShayneTilley

ShayneTilley — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:53:47 +0000

Thanks for your comprehensive comments Andy. This was never about not hitting the front page of digg, it was more that we were buried for an unjustified reason.

As my post also suggests, given that the digg button was a last minute , I was far from holding my hopes on hitting the front page. It would have been nice, but not essential. With our other promotion we had widespread coverage in a matter of days and some of our biggest traffic numbers of all time.

By: Andy Spark

Andy Spark — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:43:32 +0000

I cannot believe that you made a blog post which is effectively a hissy fit about not hitting the front page.

I’m sure that people can live without your cheap products. Most people who use Digg aren’t that tech savvy. They’re just geeks who like weed, films and law enforcement gone wrong. Geeks, not all web geeks.

And even if they are a web geek, chances are they have their own big collection of ebooks, tutorials and articles to get information from.

Yes, the ebook is a good idea. But your promotion of it through Digg was half-hearted, to say the least, but holding your hopes on it? Stupid.

It’s half chance whether the public will like any story on a given day and if it’s a boring landing page for an ebook that seemingly needs a Digg campaign to sell it for them? Who the hell would digg that?

PS - That comment (or a variation of it) is thrown up on every single page submitted to Digg, by the way. They’re called trolls. If you want to professionally run a site without looking like a toddler having a strop, get used to them. And don’t blame them for a submission not hitting the front page of Digg. There’s tons of articles with plenty of unfair claims that hit the top every single hour.

By: Desmond Kerk

Desmond Kerk — Mon, 26 May 2008 18:43:17 +0000

I agree with mattmcg.

Though a clarification could have been posted, why was that post containing the accusation not asked for verification? Where were the mods? If someone at Sitepoint posts an offer and I’m anti-Sitepoint, all I have to do is post something malicious I came up with in my head and it’s all over. Or buried, in this case.

The guys at Digg need to be a lot more strict. It’s not the first time unfounded rumors have been thrown around as facts.

By: Brent

Brent — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:37:41 +0000

And that’s why I don’t like Digg!

By: jtresidder

jtresidder — Fri, 23 May 2008 08:55:04 +0000

Thirteenva: I would appear to be missing the bigger picture too - I can’t for the life of me see how piracy of software could have anything to do with the consenting giveaway of a book about that software?

By: cranial-bore

cranial-bore — Fri, 23 May 2008 06:38:04 +0000

If Sitepoint had responded with a condemnation of pirated software it would have given weight to the rumour that the PDF did have such a check in place (though if the legitimacy of Adobe software could be checked by Adobe PDFs then I think Adobe would be more likely to implement such a thing!)

Yes, the internet is not the place to find fact-checked statements. The way comments on Digg or YouTube descend into primary school style attacks (to one another) is remarkable.

By: velocd

velocd — Thu, 22 May 2008 22:31:42 +0000

The article presenting like an ad is probably more relevant to why Diggers buried it. Articles masked as ads usually don’t sit well with Diggers.

By: mattymcg

mattymcg — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:32:07 +0000

@Thirteenva The story that was submitted was nothing to do with piracy of software. Yes, the reason the story failed to gain traction was because of that one misleading comment. Before then it was receiving diggs left, right and centre. After that comment, it didn’t just stop receiving diggs, it got *buried*. This blog post is about digg and how people use it, not about software piracy.

Who’s to say that the commenter had an anti-piracy agenda? Perhaps he was just anti-SitePoint. Weighing in with some anti-piracy rhetoric, regardless of whether we believe in it (we do), would have achieved absolutely nothing.